


A Good Day

by Eustacia Vye (eustaciavye)



Category: Firefly
Genre: Academy, Hands of Blue, Multi, Riverspeak, Written before the BDM
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-08-29
Updated: 2010-01-29
Packaged: 2017-10-06 19:29:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/57019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eustaciavye/pseuds/Eustacia%20Vye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>River never talks about what happened to her at the Academy, and Simon isn't really sure if she even remembers herself. But secrets can't remain hidden forever, and more clues begin to be revealed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

"I hate this _goram_ planet. Can we leave yet?" Jayne complained, idly scratching at his beard. They had been in Bethel on the planet Hecate for three days now, completing a trade for Badger. Mal had asked Jayne and Kaylee to look around the postings to see if there were any jobs to do, but Jayne had given up looking after an hour. He easily found Mal in the tiny marketplace, leaving Kaylee behind.

"Well, have you found us a job yet?"

"No."

"Then there's your answer." Mal smiled at Jayne, though it could hardly be called a friendly smile. "Just find us something to do, and then off we'll go."

Jayne muttered something unintelligible under his breath, then turned back toward the poor excuse of a town hall. Mal grinned, then looked around the main marketplace. Bethel was a tiny excuse of a town in the middle of Hecate, but he'd been in worse places. He could make out Simon and River's heads near the end of the market, and was glad that they could at least leave Serenity for a little while. Simon every once in a while had seemed wistful when he and Zoe returned from making shipments. He wasn't claustrophobic, at least, but Mal could understand the need to walk about on actual land every once in a while. River had been having a good day, apparently, and she had nearly done cartwheels around the loading bay.

Mal turned back to the stall he had been heading to. The stall specialized in ammunition, no questions asked. _Just in case…_

Simon was at the bookseller's stall. He looked through the various print books and the book chips that were for sale, though there wasn't very much to catch his eye. Bethel wasn't exactly a major medical center or a publishing hub. He missed having the latest journals delivered to his drop box, but it was really only a minor inconvenience. When it came down to it, medicine was medicine. It didn't matter if you had the latest journals and the newest medicines, as long as you had the basic knowledge to help the patient. And if anything, the main texts he had brought with him were better suited to his current practice than an entire year of Journal of Trauma Surgery.

Simon turned his head to ask if River had spotted any books she liked. There was one problem with that, however.

River was gone.

_Dammit! Not again!_ Simon thought fiercely. He tried telling himself this was not a time to panic. As long as no other pathetic townspeople thought she was witch, they would be fine. He took off into the marketplace, looking for River. It wasn't that crowded, so he figured that he would find her easily. He found Mal first, tucking away the ammunition he was buying.

"Mal! River's gone. She's missing."

Mal stood very still. "Where were you two?"

"The bookseller's, at the corner. She had said she was bored with my books, she wanted something new to read. But when I was going to ask her…"

"All right, all right," Mal interrupted. Simon's voice was spiraling up in his panic, and Mal really didn't want to deal with that. River tended to pick up on Simon's moods, so a panicked Simon would therefore lead to a panicked River. Mal didn't even want to contemplate how bad that could be. "Time to be calm. Did she say anything else? Was she interested in seeing something planetside?"

"Uh…" Simon ran a hand through his hair and tugged on it. "Trees. She saw trees out of the ports, she said the trees looked nice."

Mal gave Simon a ghost of a smile. "There we go. She probably wandered off toward the forest line. It's not that far, so we should find her."

Five minutes later, Simon found River at the market's edge. She was with another girl, and they were staring at each other, heads cocked to the same side. The other girl was a little taller than River, with straight blonde hair. She was dressed in a dark brown sack of a dress, with large black boots and a battered black backpack. The girl and River had the same hazy expression on their faces, smiling at each other.

"I found you," the girl said with a soft smile. "I'm so glad you're safe, _Mei mei."_

***

 

_"Guai guai long de dong!"_ Jayne cried, coming back to Serenity. His arms were full with three rather light but bulky boxes. "I can't believe the trouble I go through, just for a stupid job…."

Kaylee chuckled. "Oh come on, now. It's not so bad… This and the other transport job should keep us goin' for a while." She smiled sweetly at Jayne, holding one bulky box of her own. "It's just clothes, you know. Her daughter will loving these when the baby comes along."

Jayne pulled a face. "Baby talk. You girls are all the same, talking 'bout babies."

"Well, why not? They're so cute when they smile at you…"

"They do nothing but poop and pee all over ya after you feed 'em. You can't do nothing with 'em. They can't play or shoot or nothing."

"Well, when they grow up they can."

"Humph. You just want the Doc to give you one, don'tcha?" Jayne muttered, juggling the boxes a bit. Kaylee flushed, but didn't reply. Jayne didn't seem to notice. "All right, here we are. I'm droppin' these now, and I'll look for that guy with the shipment of tech stuff we're supposed to get."

Kaylee helped Jayne unload the boxes and tucked them away almost reverently in the corner. She had liked Mrs. Harrison, and they had chatted amicably in Town Hall. She had managed to convince Mrs. Harrison that they could ship her boxes of baby clothes to her daughter for less than the Postal Service could, since the crew wouldn't charge extra for larger boxes. Mrs. Harrison had liked that idea, and had liked Kaylee. "Got a man friend of your own?" the older woman had asked.

Kaylee had flushed. "Dunno. Sometimes I think so, but other times…"

Mrs. Harrison had laughed. "Men. They don't know how to talk for anything, especially the _shuai_ ones. The prettier they are, the less they speak."

Kaylee had laughed. "Oh, mine's a doctor. He knows his doctor-speak pretty well."

"And that's all, right?" the woman guessed. "Oh, they get like that. My Fiona married herself a physical therapist. They're not as bad as doctors, but they don't always know how to talk to real people. Just medical talk." Mrs. Harrison patted Kaylee on the arm. "But if you think your man is good enough, he'll come around eventually. Gotta learn to talk sometime, right?"

Kaylee smiled fondly and patted the final box of baby clothes. Mrs. Harrison had apparently saved every scrap of clothing from her daughter Fiona and her son Adam, who had joined the Alliance army. Mrs. Harrison hadn't heard from him since, and thought that Fiona could use the clothes with her baby on the way. "What a nice old lady," she murmured, smiling. She reached into one of her jumpsuit pockets and pulled out the receipt. Mal would file it away and have Wash figure out the best route.

She turned around and headed toward the back of the loading bay. She stopped short, seeing Simon, River, Mal and a strange blonde girl standing just in front of the main staircase. She hadn't noticed them when entering the ship with Jayne.

"Cap'n?" Kaylee asked, uncertain.

"You got us some jobs?" Mal called out, not taking his eyes off of the blonde girl.

"Sure thing. Jayne's getting the last shipment we found."

"Good. Soon as he does, tell Wash to get us off this ball of rock." Mal still didn't look up at Kaylee. "We all got a long talk ahead of us."

"Okay… I guess I'll go help."

No one moved, and Kaylee sighed. She shook her head slightly and headed back out toward Bethel. She would find out soon enough what was going on.

***

 

"Today is a good day," the blonde girl said serenely. She was seated at the dining room table, across from everyone else. Simon had forbade River from sitting next to her, and River was still pouting.

_"Mei mei,"_ the girl said, turning toward River. She had almond-shaped green eyes, as though somewhere in her ancestry there had been Asiatic blood. "I was worried when you left. Everything was confusing. It was easy to slip out afterward."

"But they took you away," River said suddenly, cutting off Mal. Her voice was vaguely hurt and confusing. "They took you, and you never came back."

"Of course not," the girl said, voice sharp. "That's what they do. They take you away and then they strap you down." River flinched, and cowered slightly. Simon put an arm around her, and the blonde girl noticed that. "He helped you, didn't he?" the girl murmured wistfully. "It must be nice to have a _ge ge."_

"Tell me what happened," Mal said, voice hard. If this girl was from the Academy as River was, it was very likely the "strapped down" comment was referring to a similar type of brain treatment. River often lost track of conversations, focusing on oddities around the ship or speaking in tangents. He didn't want this girl sidetracked in any way. "Start with your name."

"Moira," the girl said, blinking. "Didn't I tell you?"

"Nope," Mal said. He noticed Wash heading into the kitchen from the flight deck, but didn't move to make room for him. Wash settled into place next to Zoe, behind Jayne, Book and Inara. Kaylee, Simon and River were seated on Inara's other side, and Mal was standing next to River. Just in case.

"Oh. I'm sorry. I'm usually pretty good about that. Mama always drilled me so hard when I was little, I was always forgetting. I'm Moira Scott. I'm originally from Reston, though I got to the Core pretty young, I guess." Moira smiled almost beatifically. "I was always just a little too smart for my own good. They couldn't teach me at Reston, and I just about memorized the planet's entire library by looking at it. It almost made up for the Scott side of the family being so damn poor all the damn time."

Mal shook his head a bit. "What?"

"Today is a good day. I can actually follow a conversation and not get too lost. You do that sometimes. You get lost, but you can't really help it when your amygdala's cut to shreds." Moira grinned at River. "But yours should be better. You should have benefited and you should be better off in situations. I'm Version One-Point-Oh, and you know you're Version Two. They got all their practice with the neuro knives on me, and they perfected it with your turn in the chair." Moira frowned. "Or maybe they got it right on the other ones?"

"Other ones?" Simon asked in a hushed voice. It certainly made sense that River wouldn't be the only one experimented on, but it hurt to hear it.

"Oh yes. They draw us in like flies. I didn't have any money for the good schools, and I won the scholarship to Reston's central university at eight. But the University wasn't good enough, they couldn't handle me when I could figure out everything. It never looks good when a child can outperform a professor in the middle of class, even if you think quantum physics isn't so hard. So they looked around for a program I could handle, mostly in the Core Worlds. And then they came back with the applications, and I liked the Academy best. It had the most varied classes, everything personalized, a high teacher-student ratio… The library. The library would've been phenomenal, the most cutting edge technology at my fingertips to work with, the most famous names.

"It was perfect, and _I won a scholarship._ My family couldn't pay for anything. Antoinette Hsing fell in love with a tradesman and refused the man her family picked and then came all of us Scotts with more sense than money, and so they couldn't pay for school. But I won the scholarship to the Academy. I could go, it would've opened up worlds for me…" Moira leaned back in the chair suddenly and shut her eyes. A tear slipped out from beneath her eyelids, and her hands were fisted at her sides. "It should've been like they promised."

"What actually happened?" Simon asked. River had grabbed hold of his shirt, her face tucked into the crook of his neck. It had been the same way with her. River had been too gifted for the local schools, and the lure of the Academy's benefits had been too good to pass up. It was supposed to have been a great opportunity.

"They take you, and strap you down. And they come with the knives, the orderlies… Not the hands of blue. They stay back. They only watch, they direct." River shuddered violently against Simon.

"Hands of blue?" Mal asked.

Moira dug her fists against her temples, her eyes squeezed shut. "They take you down the hallway and there are doors and you know what's down there, you know it and you can hear it and your heart hurts in your chest because you know what's coming and it doesn't stop and it doesn't end and they cut and they cut and they cut some more even though you're screaming because the drugs aren't right, they don't have enough benzos to cut the haze and they don't have enough lido to cut the pain and they don't care anyway because it's only a study and they really don't have to care and…."

"Moira!" Mal said sharply.

Moira opened her eyes, her jaws snapping shut with a click. Her eyes were shining wet, and she looked at him accusingly as her hands dropped down to her lap. "But you wanted to know. You said you wanted to know exactly what happened."

Mal took in a deep breath. "I wanted to know how you got to Hecate."

"Oh!" Moira brightened visibly and took in a deep breath. "Well, the orderlies were all scattered, and the noisemakers went off. Some of the other girls thought it was time to go back to the chair, and they started screaming. But when you go to the chair, there aren't any noisemakers. So I opened the door to my room and got away to the Outer Court. The lights were on, and the sirens, and there were so many guards and Blues. But it was easy to find the way if you don't mind getting dirty, and if it took crawling through the sewers to get out of the Academy, well it wasn't too much different than helping out back home in summers when _Ba Ban_ needed help. Cause it was really just me and my blood _mei mei_ back home with _Ma_ and _Ba."_

"But how did you get from the Core to Hecate?" Mal insisted.

"I snuck into the first transport I could find," Moira said simply. "They don't recheck their holds once they're up in the air, and if you're not listed on the manifest then no one will think to check the corners behind the crates. I did that a few times, and then I was in Persephone. That place is pretty nice, and it's okay if I'm a little odd there because there's so many odd people there. But there was someone who talked about a little girl from his hometown on the _Serenity_ that he had hoped to see again, and when he was talking about her to one of the other guys, she sounded just like _Mei Mei."_

_"Mei Mei?"_ Mal said, looking at River. "You mean River?"

"Of course. She didn't have a big sister, and my blood _mei mei_ was back home. And River has eyes like my sister does. So when she first came in, of course I was going to try and take care of her." Moira smiled as River looked up. "I did my best, didn't I? I tried to tell you everything, even when they didn't let us."

"I remember," River whispered. "I do."

Moira smiled sweetly. "Of course. And today's a good day."

"You keep saying that," Jayne muttered darkly, shaking his head. "It sure don't seem like a good day to me."

"But it is. I don't always have good days, but on good days I'm almost like everyone else and it doesn't hurt so much to think. Good days are great. Good days, I know what I'm seeing is what I'm really seeing, and I'm hearing things I'm really hearing. Good days, I don't feel so much, it doesn't hurt as much. You tend to shy away from pain, so why think along logical lines if it's going to hurt?" Moira shrugged and then stretched in her chair. "And it's another day they haven't found me, and I found _Mei Mei._ So of course today is a good day. I like good days. I don't get enough of them."

"Is there anyplace you need to go? Back to your family?" Mal asked. He was regretting yanking her onto his ship already.

Moira literally sat on her hands. "Oh no. They can't understand this. And they almost wrote me off years ago, after sending me to University. Every summer I came back, I was like a stranger to them, more Hsing and less Scott, but they didn't know what to do with me. They never knew what to do with me. And even if I learn not to use the larger words around them, or talk about things they've never read, they know it's there. They know I've mastered things they didn't even dream existed. They know I'm something they can't reach. And you can't help but fear it a little, this creature you don't know living in a familiar skin. And you can't help but hate what you fear, and you can't help but stop loving what you hate." She looked up at Mal. "So no, Captain. You can't take me back to Reston. But that's okay with me. I've accepted it. I've had time with it, and I know this is what it's like to be me. But I do have a request of you."

"What is it?" Mal asked, almost warily. He was _really_ starting to regret bringing her on board _Serenity._

"I'll tell you about the Academy, whatever they did or plan to do. Or reason something out with you, so you can stay one step ahead. They can't find _Mei Mei,_ so you need to know what you're dealing with to keep her safe."

"We can do that," Mal said, nodding. Knowing what they were facing besides the Alliance was a good thing.

"And in return, you can shoot me out the airlock."

A startled series of cried erupted from the crew. _"Wei!"_ Wash cried, stepping backward into the bulkhead.

_"Wo de ma!"_ Jayne whispered, stunned.

Moira just smiled that same hazy smile she had given to River. She locked eyes with River again and said sweetly "I keep my promises."

"I know," River whispered.

"Then keep this one for me."

"I can't."

_"Mei mei…"_ Moira said, cocking her head to the side. "You are _yisui._ Fragile things can't survive long with them. We have to."

Book had remained silent and calm throughout the entire exchange. "Moira," he said, voice calm. She turned to him, her head still cocked to the side. "What exactly do you know about that place?"

"Just about everything, probably. I've been there for a long time. And after a while, they stop caring what you see."

"And knowing about them will help us protect River?"

"Oh yes. Because they're so much worse than the Alliance. They'll kill Alliance if they get in the way."

That simple statement shocked most of the table to silence. River turned back toward Simon, hiding her face again.

"If they kill Alliance, how are we going to stop them?" Mal asked, voice level. He could feel Zoe's and Jayne's eyes on him.

"Because you'll know. The Alliance doesn't even know."

"You'll need to start talking."

Moira smiled. "Of course. And when I'm done, you can let me loose into space."

"We'll figure that out when the time comes," Mal insisted.

"I want to die, Captain. I don't have many good days left anymore. I get more bad days than good ones, and I don't want my bad days to be when they catch me. Because then I won't even get those. I've thought about it, and it's really the only way this will work. Even if I could go home, they'll be watched. The Academy isn't stupid. They know where you come from, they know your support network. They know everything, and they use it against you. You won't even see them coming if they don't want you to."

"But surely there's someone…" Inara began.

Moira leaned forward into the table as she spoke. "So when my good days run out, they'll know, and they'll come looking, and they'll find me. And then it will only be a matter of time before they also know I've seen you." Moira leaned back in her chair, pleased with herself. "So really, there's no other option. I tell you everything about the place and what they're doing. You do what you need to do with that information. But I get shot out the airlock when we're done. I want your promise."

Mal looked at the crew, each one in turn. Zoe and Wash were standing close together, giving each other silent support. Jayne's mouth was hung partly open in stunned shock. Kaylee and Inara were shaking their heads, unable to comprehend the girl. Book looked disturbed, but met Mal's gaze evenly, ready to accept whatever decision he came to. River was curled up against Simon, shaking slightly, and he was doing his best to comfort her. Each of them were waiting for his decision.

Mal looked at Moira. She certainly didn't seem crazy at the moment, and certainly didn't seem any more dangerous than she had back on Hecate. She seemed like a lost teenager bargaining for a ride home rather than negotiating for death.

"All right," Mal said quietly. "I promise."

***  
***


	2. Chapter 2

"This is stupid."

Moira looked up at Jayne, confusion written all over her face. "Huh? _Wo bù dong?"_

"This dying thing. You know, lots of people try real hard not to die."

Moira shrugged, and folded her arms over the lower railing of the staircase landing. She was sitting on the landing, legs dangling down into the space above the loading bay. She swung them around playfully, bare toes wiggling. Moira had adopted River's habit of walking through the ship barefoot quickly enough, and Jayne was starting to wonder if that was something left over from the Academy.

"You're not scared?"

"Sit down," Moira replied, moving to pat the landing beside her.

"I'd rather stand, thanks," Jayne said. He folded his arms across his chest. "In case I get called or something. You sure you weren't followed?"

"I thought for a while I might have an implanted homing beacon. It's something I would've done, after all, and I don't put it past them." Jayne stepped back slightly, but stopped when Moira began to speak again. "But after scratching up my skin and looking for it, I figured I probably don't have one. The signal would gum up the works with our brains. They like our brains. They're special brains. And really, why would you ruin the one thing of value?"

"You didn't do anything else but get your head sliced?"

"Oh, there were classes and training at first. I mean, I was eleven. I had potential. The brain still has an amazing plasticity at that age, and there was just so much information poured into it. I soaked it up like water. And then when I turned thirteen, they stopped with the training and started with the cutting." Moira looked up at Jayne and smiled slightly, almost painfully. "I was the first one, I think. Version One-Point-Oh. I think the other girls got slightly different treatments than I did."

"So then, what'd they do? What did you do?"

"Exercises, mostly. Lots and lots of exercises."

Jayne frowned. "Like playing at stuff?"

"No. Not fun stuff like that." Moira suddenly grinned. "I know! We'll make a game here, we'll get a basketball or something. It's big enough for a court down there. Maybe even a full one. We can play."

"Yeah, we do that," Jayne said with a grin. "We usually put baskets up here and play."

"I haven't played since I left for University. I remember it was fun."

Jayne helped Moira up to a standing position. "You never did anything fun since?"

"Well, studying was fun. I did lots of that. I read everything I could get my hands on, and I thought that was fun."

Jayne snorted. "That's book learnin', not fun. I'm talking like… games. Or going out and getting drunk. Or getting laid."

Moira cocked her head to the side, brows furrowed in thought. "Laid? Laid down on something? Something is laid down? Is it the name of something? What's the connotation? I don't think I know what that one is."

His eyes widened. "You never got laid before?"

"But what is that?" Moira asked, insistent. "What kind of object?"

"No object," Jayne said, beginning to get flustered. "Just… ya know… _sex."_

"Oh! Copulation!" Moira laughed. "Nope. Never done that. One of the other girls at the Academy did, she said it was fun."

"You know, that's a shame," Jayne said, shaking his head. "Pretty girl like you, not knowing what that's like before you die. You should really try it, at least once. More like at least twice or three times," he added when Moira seemed to think it over.

"Seems like it would be an awful lot of trouble. Girls like me don't get guys talking to them much. No one likes it when we talk."

"I don't mind," Jayne said quickly. "I just don't know half of what you say, but I don't mind that so much."

Moira smiled at him. "You're sweet."

"I don't get called that too often."

"Really?" Moira reached out and gave Jayne a bear hug. "You should."

"So you wanna….?"

"Hm?" Moira thought for a moment, tracking their conversation. "Oh. You mean… Oh. Okay. I don't mind. Might as well try it, see what they were talking about, right? Do you mind? Most people mind if they get used like that."

Jayne shook his head quickly and grinned at Moira. "I don't mind at all. You know, me being sweet and all. It's okay."

Moira returned Jayne's grin. "Okay, then. How about now?"

Jayne looked around quickly. The loading bay was empty. Simon and River were likely in the guest quarters or medical area. Book would be doing something preacherlike in his room. Kaylee was in the engine room. Wash was piloting. Who knew where Zoe and Mal were, but they weren't here right now.

It was perfect.

Jayne held out his arm in a rather gallant fashion. Moira grinned at him and took his arm gently, just a light touch on his arm. "This way, milady," he said grandly. Moira only giggled.

She hummed a tune as Jayne brought her to his cabin. He let her in first, then quickly looked up and down the hallway. No one. He followed her down into the room and locked the door. Moira had sat down on his bed, bouncing a little bit, humming like a child. It was almost unnerving, but Jayne pushed the feeling away. She was willing, after all. No one could complain that he was taking advantage. She just wanted to learn about it.

"So what do I do?" Moira asked, looking up at Jayne expectantly. "Is there a certain way I should sit to get it started? I mean, I've read about it in books, and I know how the biology works and why it would happen physiologically, but doing is always different from reading about something, and I really would like to—"

Jayne pulled her to her feet and kissed her on the mouth, cutting her off. _She hadn't been kidding about the talking,_ Jayne thought. And he hadn't been kidding about not understanding half of her words, but it really didn't matter. Her lips were soft and open, and she let his tongue enter her mouth. She was startled, but let him do what he wanted. Her arms were at her sides, hanging almost uncertainly.

Jayne broke the kiss and looked at her. "You can touch me, you know. Anywhere."

"But… Is there a place you like best? Is there something I should be doing?"

"Just… You know what? Sit down. We'll just sit down, and start from there." Jayne watched her flop down on the bed, nearly falling back as she bounced. "You need to be careful. I got some guns back there. For protection," he added hastily, seeing Moira's eyes widen. "'Cause you can never tell when someone's going to try and attack you on a deal. Shipping can be a dangerous profession if you don't keep an eye out."

"Has anyone done that to you?" Moira asked, eyes huge and childlike.

"Well, that's what I got them for. In case. It doesn't happen often, but you never can tell if this is going to be it or not."

Moira turned her head slightly. "Can I peek?"

"I thought you wanted to try this sex thing?" Jayne replied, keeping his voice light. She looked almost crestfallen. "You can look later."

She brightened immediately. "Okay, then. So show me how this works." Jayne sat down next to her, angling himself so that he was facing her. She changed position slightly so that she was facing him as well. "Should I change? I don't have anything pretty in my bag, but this dress is especially ugly."

"So why wear it?"

"Someone was throwing it away. And I didn't have anything else to wear but the Academy uniform, and I couldn't keep wearing that."

"You look fine. And you don't keep your clothes on for sex anyway."

Moira looked astonished. "Oh! Of course! I didn't even think of that."

She started to get up, but Jayne pulled her back down. "Sit down. There's no rush to this, right? You got some time, I got some time." He gently touched her face, tucking her hair behind an ear. "So now, we go slow. So you really know how it works." He smiled at her serious expression. _"Dong ma?"_

She grinned at him. _"Dong ma."_

Jayne kissed her again, hands cupping her face. Moira closed her eyes and leaned into the kiss, opening her mouth as she had before. She felt his tongue in her mouth again, soft and not that unpleasant. It was different. She could feel Jayne's hand cupped around her face, and his other touching her leg lightly. It felt almost protective, almost hesitant. Then his touch became a little firmer, traveling up the side of her torso to end at a breast. His thumb circled her nipple, and Moira pulled back with a sharp intake of breath. Her eyes were wide, almost fearful, and she held out her hands in front of her almost protectively.

"Hey… What happened?" Jayne asked. Moira looked almost panicky, which was starting to make him feel a little uneasy. He remembered River going off the deep end with no warning before, and was now starting to rethink his idea of locking himself in his cabin alone with Moira. But the girl was shaking, and Jayne touched her arm gently. _"Shénme?"_

"The orderlies… The orderlies touch the girls like that. The bad ones. The ones that don't ever come back, the ones that the hands of blue can't use anymore, the ones that won't stop screaming in the hallways." Moira was close to tears. "I'm not bad, I did what they wanted, I stopped fighting back when they told me to. Don't give me to the orderlies…"

Jayne pulled her toward him, holding her close. "Sh… You know me. It's Jayne. I'm just Jayne, okay? I'm no orderly, whatever that is. Okay? We was just kissing, and I said I'd touch you. And that's what happens when kissing becomes more."

Moira sniffled. "The other girls…"

"She was being a _si san ba,_ that's all. Just trying to scare you."

"Okay." Moira wiped her face and smiled at Jayne. _"Duìbùqî."_

"S'alright. Just trust me, okay? I won't hurt you."

Moira leaned forward and kissed Jayne, throwing her arms around him. He deepened the kiss, and ran his hands down her back. He leaned into her, moving one of his hands from her back to her front. He moved more slowly and deliberately this time, and was rewarded with a content little sigh. He moved the straps to her backpack, sliding them down her arms. She shrugged out of the straps the rest of the way, and her backpack tumbled off the bed onto the floor. "Oops. I should pick that up…"

"Leave it," Jayne murmured, leaning further. He took her earlobe between his teeth and was rewarded with a surprised squeak of pleasure. "You don't need it now."

Jayne kissed his way along Moira's jaw, his hands roaming across her front. He noted where her little mewling noises increased in volume and kept that up. After a few minutes, her legs began to move a little restlessly, and Moira arched her back, pushing herself into Jayne touch. Grinning, he pushed the skirt of her dress up, exposing her thighs. Her skin was soft along the insides of her thighs, and her hands tightened on his shirt. "Jayne? What are you doing? That's different now."

"It's okay… Just do what comes natural."

"Wouldn't that mean taking my clothes off?" Moira asked, confused.

Jayne couldn't keep the grin from his face. "Sure, we'll try that." He helped her take off her clothes, and had her help him with his shirt and pants. Jayne pushed her down to her back and stretched out on top of her. "Feel comfy?"

"Well, there's this lump under my back, and it's kind of poking me…"

He kissed her again, one hand at her breast. She made little contented noises, and reached up to his shoulders and neck. Jayne broke off the kiss to move down and suck on a breast, and she gasped in shock. His hand was moving down the side of her body, to the junction between her thighs. She was damp there, and Jayne lifted his head. "Ready?"

"Okay," Moira said, nodding. "What do I do now?"

Jayne nudged her legs apart. "Now I go here…"

Moira looked down between their bodies. "It looks awful messy."

"Good sex usually is," Jayne replied sagely, nodding. He positioned himself in between her legs, then pushed forward past her barrier. She nearly screamed, and only Jayne's hand over her mouth kept the sound low. She dug her broken fingernails into his forearm, and tried to move out from beneath him. "It should go away," he said helpfully.

Moira shook her head and pulled Jayne's hand away from her mouth. Her breath came in shuddering gasps, and she blinked away her tears rapidly. "It hurts," she whimpered. "It hurts a lot, like I'm getting stuck with a needle."

Not liking needles, Jayne winced. "I didn't think it would be that bad. _Ni meí shì bà?_ If I wait a little, you should be okay."

"I gotta go," Moira whined, pushing on Jayne's chest. "It hurts, we need to stop. I need to go."

Reluctantly, Jayne pulled out and rolled off of Moira. "Well, the toilet's over there…"

She rummaged in her backpack and pulled out something white that resembled a nightshirt. Once she pulled it over her head, she walked to the ladder and hit the release button. "I need to go, I'm done now," she said simply, looking at Jayne. "Thank you."

Stunned, Jayne watched her climb up the stairs. He took a look around the room and winced. Oh, things looked really, really bad. Not to mention he was still hard and there was a little bit of blood. _"Made!"_ he swore. This looked really, really bad.

If Mal found out, Jayne was a dead man.

He quickly washed up and threw on his old clothes. He had to catch up to her and make sure she wouldn't say anything to anyone else. They wouldn't see it his way. She was moderately pretty and not built too badly, but she was nuttier than a fruitcake, and the others would say he was taking advantage of her. Well, okay, maybe. But she had wanted him to! And she had been perfectly aware and lucid at the time!

Jayne nearly stepped on Moira's head. She was lying on her stomach on the stairway landing, looking off into space. Her lips were moving silently, though he couldn't make out the words. It seemed almost as though she were singing to herself. Jayne could feel the fine hairs on the back of his neck begin to stand up at attention. He forced himself to stand there calmly, and he cleared his throat. "So Moira, what are you doing?"

"Watching my kitten play. Sasha is so cute, just like a little ball of fluff."

"A kitten."

"Yes. _Ba_ got her for my sister, but then she always used to come play with me."

"And where do you think this kitten is?" Jayne asked, unnerved. He stepped down onto the landing with a clang.

"Jayne, you frightened her," Moira said reproachfully. She didn't even turn her head, though her gaze shifted to a different part of the loading bay. "Now I need to go find the kitten." She sounded sad and lost, something that made Jayne's vestigial conscience take notice.

"I'll go find it for you," Jayne offered. "You can go back to bed. You should sleep."

She smiled at him and then rolled onto her back. The cloth for the nightshirt was fairly worn out and thin, and Jayne could see the darker patches where her breasts were. He quickly looked away and bit down on the inside of his cheek. He was going to think good thoughts. The girl was a nutcase. She was seeing things. It didn't matter how soft her skin was, and that he hadn't had sex in four months. She was crazy, and it never paid to sleep with crazy girls. Crazy girls went nuts and they did crazy things and it was never good to be caught up in that, even if he hadn't gotten laid in four months.

"You're sweet," Moira murmured softly, standing up. She leaned up next to him and dropped a kiss on his cheek. "And you'll look, won't you? Even if she isn't there?"

Confused, Jayne watched her through half lidded eyes. "You think that kitten ain't there?"

"Oh, I know she's not. She drowned when I was ten. But then Sasha came along, and she was really just _my_ cat. Sasha's my ball of fluff."

There was a sharp chill that moved down Jayne's spine. He slowly went down the stairs into the loading bay. "So Sasha's here?"

"She's near the boxes over there," Moira said, pointing across the loading bay. "I saw her. She wouldn't come when I called, and she wouldn't come when I sang her favorite song. Something scared her really badly."

"I'll go get 'er. I'll keep her safe. You go on to sleep. I'll be right back."

Jayne made a big show of looking for the kitten as she left the landing area, headed in the direction of the crew cabins. Jayne counted to ten in his head with his eyes closed, wondering when it would be safe to stop. In doing so, he stepped right into one of the tech boxes he had helped load earlier that day. He swore violently from the pain shooting up his foot, and accidentally knocked over another crate.

Mal arrived from the flight area soon after, hand on his gun. He looked down at the loading area and saw Jayne swearing up a storm. "Couldn't figure out the code to open the boxes?" he asked with a grin, his hand moving away from his gun.

Jayne scowled at Mal. "It ain't funny."

"Sure is from where I'm standing."

"I ain't tryin' to snag the cargo. That girl Moira asked me to look for her cat."

"Her cat," Mal repeated slowly. Jayne could tell that Mal wasn't believing it for a second.

"Look. She said I was sweet, I had to help her look. I said yes 'cause she's nuttier than a fruitcake! What are you gonna do, say no? The girl is out of her mind, worse than River in some ways. And if River can cut me open 'cause she thinks red's my color, you think I'm going to let another one get mad at me?"

Mal pursed his lips. "You think she's dangerous, Jayne?"

He shrugged, not sure of what he should say. Then he thought of Vera and his guns, and the fact that now she would be sleeping within arm's reach of his beloved collection. "You know, maybe she might be. I'd better go check on her."

"Are you sweet on her?" Mal asked suddenly, voice hard and cold. That shiver down Jayne's spine returned as he shook his head. "Good. 'Cause she is off limits. Her brain ain't right, and she's not really an adult. Okay? You leave her alone."

"Well, I said she could sleep in my bunk. I didn't know if she had a place to stay," Jayne added lamely as Mal quite obviously was getting angry.

"Jayne, so help me, if she says she's been hurt…"

"Look, ask her. I didn't do anything wrong!"

Mal didn't wait for Jayne to get to the top of the stairs. He headed straight to Jayne's cabin and went down the ladder. Moira was in the thin white nightshirt, sitting cross legged on the bed and looking expectantly at the door. "Oh. Hello, Captain. Did you want to talk again?"

"We got a room ready for you in with the guest area. This is for the crew."

"It's nice and cozy in here, though," Moira said simply. "You sure I can't stay?"

"Best if you don't," Mal replied after a moment. He tried not to smile when he caught her childishly disappointed expression. "But cheer up, you'll be right next door to River and you two can talk as much as you want."

She brightened visibly. "That's right. And I'm sure _Mei Mei_ and I will have lots to talk about! We've been separated for a long time. I almost thought being Version Two would kill her. Or worse, make her strange."

Mal raised an eyebrow. "Being strange is worse than being dead?"

"It is in the Academy," Moira said, picking up her dress and backpack from the floor. "The only thing worse than being strange is the orderlies. And they're not good for you at all. Those girls were the bad ones, they were sent away and you could only hear them screaming for days. I don't think I ever decided if it was worse when they were screaming or when they finally stopped, because they only ever stopped suddenly."

Mal found himself nodding at her, not knowing what to say. "Uh… Yeah. Hard call, there."

"So where's the room? Is it pretty?"

"Er… Kinda plain, really. Pretty ain't my department."

Moira pouted slightly. "I don't have any pretty things. I would've liked something pretty."

"Why not talk to Kaylee or Inara about that kind of thing?" Mal asked, pointing upward. "You can always check and see if Kaylee's in her bunk. She's good at that."

"Okay," Moira said brightly. "And Inara had the pretty dangly earrings, and she has the nice dresses. She seems real sweet."

Smiling, Mal nodded at her. "I'm sure she can be. Why don't you go talking to her? She should be in her shuttle. It's right down the hall up there."

With a grin, Moira climbed up the ladder and disappeared out of sight. Mal took a quick look around Jayne's cabin and his smile disappeared. He climbed up the ladder and stalked down the walkway to the loading area, but Jayne was out of sight.

"Bastard's lucky I didn't catch him," Mal growled to himself. He shook his head, then turned around and headed for his own bunk. He would deal with Jayne later.

Jayne waited for ten minutes before coming out of his hiding place beneath the stairs. This was not looking good. And he didn't even get all the way through the deed! All this trouble and it wasn't even very good!

Muttering under his breath, he headed up to his cabin.

In the meantime, Moira had knocked on the door to Inara's shuttle. "Hello? Anyone in there?"

_"Qingjin."_

Moira smiled nervously at Inara. "Hi."

Inara put aside the book she had been reading. The blonde hair was tangled, and she was twisting the sack dress nervously in her hands. "Moira. Is something the matter?"

"Your things are too pretty. I shouldn't be here, I'll break something."

Frowning, Inara stood. "Don't be silly. Sit down. Would you like some tea?"

"Ginseng?" Moira asked hopefully. "Not the bitter kind?"

Inara smiled gently. "I don't like the bitter kind either." She moved to where she kept her tea set, and looked through her canisters of tea. She didn't often have ginseng, so that canister was still full. She usually preferred the jasmine or oolong teas.

Moira sat down at the vanity table. Her dress was laid carefully down on her lap, and she kept her backpack slung over her shoulder. Her eyes drifted longingly over the crystal bottles, then she tentatively picked one up. "This one smells like you," Moira murmured, lifting it up to her nose. "I remember from the kitchen."

"I'm surprised you could smell that from across the table," Inara said, measuring out the tea. "It still smelled like lunch to me."

"Oh, but I can smell lots of things really good. They improved my vision and reflexes, too. Part of the training, I suppose. Did you know that this bottle is perfectly weighted to be a projectile missile? I could break your head with this."

Inara looked up, her expression carefully neutral. "I didn't know that. Did they teach you that at the Academy?"

"I guess so," Moira murmured thoughtfully, bouncing the bottle in her palm. "I don't remember all of the classes I had if they were just before my sessions with the neuro knife. They tended to give anterograde amnesia, but sometimes I would get retrograde amnesia, too." She carefully placed the bottle back in its original position. It was even angled in the same careless way. "But not really, because I would remember the lessons, but not how I learned them. The hands of blue never did figure out why I reacted like that."

"That can't be very fun," Inara commented mildly, setting out the cups.

"I guess not. But then, Jayne said that reading and studying, which I like, isn't very fun."

"Studying can be fun, if it's something you like."

Moira nodded. "That's what I thought. But he thinks kissing is more fun."

Inara blinked. "Really?"

"Mm-hm. We tried that. That was nice." Moira looked down into her empty cup, missing Inara's startled expression. "No tea?"

"The water has to come to a boil."

"Oh, that's right. I forgot about that." She reached out and touched Inara's dangling jet earrings. "These are pretty. Mama had earrings like those once. She sold them to pay for my ticket to university. Later I heard her say to _Ba_ that she regretted it, that I should never have left, it wasn't worth the trip."

Inara took off the earrings. "She must have missed you a lot."

"No," Moira replied. "I don't think she did at all… She said I was too strange. She said there wasn't anything good to come out of learning, no good at all. She didn't want me around, and said she lost her earrings for nothing."

Inara closed the earrings into Moira's palm. "Why don't you try sending her these? I'm sure she didn't mean it that way. Your mother probably just missed you. You seem to have gone away very young."

"Yes. But she didn't like me very much, the way I knew things she didn't. She didn't want me coming back from University, and I know she was glad that I wouldn't come home from the Academy. We thought it best that way."

"Who did? You? Or your mother?"

Moira shrugged. "It doesn't matter. There's no place for me now. I just wanted to be sure that _Mei Mei_ was safe. Because if the hands of blue get to her, I don't think she'll ever be able to get away again."

Inara watched her poke at the jet earrings in her palm. "What are the hands of blue?"

Moira looked up, startled. "You don't want to know. It isn't good to know. Because when they come… everyone dies. That's all. They'll come for you and they won't touch you, but you drop down dead and there's blood everywhere."

"From what?"

"Everywhere. There's red everywhere, it looks almost pretty. Almost everyone looks good in red, unless they're just really sallow." Moira looked over at the teakettle as it whistled. "I think it's ready now."

Inara blinked. "Yes. Let me pour you some tea." She noticed Moira shivering slightly. "Are you cold? Do you need a different nightgown?"

Moira paused for a moment, head cocked to the side in thought. She suddenly thrust her left fist at Inara, the earrings closed tightly in her palm. Moira didn't seem to realize she had nearly struck Inara in the chest. "You should take these back. I shouldn't take anything from you. It's not right. I didn't offer anything to you as a guest, and I'm only taking things from you. I can't reciprocate." Moira shook her head. "I don't deserve anything pretty. They only get taken away or smashed up or torn."

"You don't have to, Moira."

"Sure I do. Just because everyone thinks I'm crazy, it doesn't mean I have to be rude."

Nonplused, Inara watched as Moira dropped the earrings into her lap. Moira poured the two cups of tea, some of the hot water sloshing over the sides of the cups. Her hands shook slightly. "I know what they say. I can hear them, you know. I can hear their thoughts, and so I know what they're thinking of me. And it hurts, you know. It hurts a lot, because I didn't want that, I didn't want any of that. I just wanted to go back to teach."

Inara held Moira as she began to cry silently, her fist curled over her mouth. It was disturbing; it looked as though she had learned to cry in silence by violent means.

Something had to be done about Moira and the Academy, but Inara had no idea what to do.


	3. Chapter 3

Inara had brushed out Moira's hair, working out most of the tangles by hand first. After a warm bath, Moira changed into a light blue silk nightgown Inara gave her. Moira put on makeup for the first time, and giggled playfully like a child at her appearance in the mirror. "It doesn't really look like me," Moira laughed, giving Inara a bear hug.

"Of course it does. Look, that's your nose and your eyes and your mouth. We just made it look a little bit more put together."

"Oh good! Because I've fallen all to pieces, and with my brain cut apart, I don't think I'd find them all."

Not sure of what to say, Inara watched Moira run out of the shuttle with only her backpack. She picked up the forgotten brown dress and tossed it in the corner. One of her older kimono robes would look so much better on Moira, especially when she took care of her appearance. Inara smiled to herself; there she went, being almost mothering and trying to make every girl as pretty as she could possibly be. Inara straightened up her sitting area, then took the tea set to her sink to wash it out. She picked up the discarded nightshirt, noting how threadbare it was. It couldn't have possibly kept her warm at night.

There were spots of blood on the inside of the shirt, just where the girl had been sitting.

Inara looked up, lips parted slightly. Mal had to know about this. He couldn't possibly want Jayne and that girl together. But Inara didn't want to interact with him any more than necessary, and she wasn't entirely sure that Moira would be in danger.

Twisting the cloth between her hands, Inara wondered what would happen between Jayne and Moira. Hopefully, he would treat the girl well.

***

 

Moira walked back along the hallway above the loading bay, then on impulse climbed up onto the railing. She walked along it as if it were a highbeam from gymnastics class. It was easy to ignore the horrific drop beneath the hallway, and she laughed delightedly. She thought it over, and decided against doing a cartwheel. The nightgown's skirt was a little too narrow to do a proper cartwheel on the railing, and that would likely send her careening out into space. She looked down into the bay, and saw Jayne watching her, mouth open in surprise. Moira waved, then decided to somersault down onto the stacked boxes of tech supplies. She landed gracefully, and grinned down at Jayne. "Hello."

"How do you do that?"

"I'm flexible," Moira said. She let Jayne help her climb down the boxes. "Thanks. It's late though. You should get to bed."

"And what about you?"

"I'm going to talk to _Mei Mei_ before I go to sleep. I didn't get to talk to her all day, and she's the reason I came here."

Jayne caught her around the waist as she strode past. "Look... I... uh... I just wanted to make sure you were all right."

Moira turned within his grasp. "Why wouldn't I be? Inara made me all pretty."

He swallowed nervously. "I noticed. But I mean, before. When you ran out."

"Oh. I feel better now. Quick healing and all that. Let me talk to _Mei Mei_ before I explain everything else to the Captain tomorrow."

Jayne pulled her closer instead. Her features suddenly seemed to fit together nicely, instead of looking out of place. The silk slid across her skin, and Jayne could feel every inch of her pressed against his body. Whatever he had intended to say flew right out of his head. He nipped on one of her earlobes playfully. "I was wondering if you wanted to finish what we started."

Moira looked at him blankly. "I thought you taught me everything already."

"Oh no. There's lots more stuff to do. And you did like the kissing part."

"Yes, I did." She grinned at him, then leaned forward to kiss Jayne. "It's kinda nice."

He ran his hands down her back and noted the lack of underclothes. Perfect. "How about we go back to my bunk?"

"The captain said I shouldn't sleep there since it's for crew only. And I don't want to get him angry. He won't let me die if he's angry with me." Moira leaned in and kissed the tip of Jayne's nose. "So I've got to say no."

"Who said anything about sleeping?"

Moira cocked her head to the side. _"Shénme?"_

Jayne kissed her again, full on the mouth. "I figured I could show you something else, then you go off to sleep in your room."

"Oh! Of course. That's a wonderful idea."

She let Jayne lead her off into his cabin, and watched him lock the door. She sat down on the bed much as she had the last time, and Jayne shed his shirt quickly. "You do look real pretty like this," he murmured, touching her face gently. "You sure you gotta die?"

"Mm-hm," Moira murmured as Jayne nuzzled her neck. "'Cause sooner or later, the hands of blue will find me. They always get what they want. And I don't want my insides melted and my brains sucked out."

Jayne stilled. "Hands of blue?" He dimly remembered River wailing about that as they were escaping the security facility of Ariel.

"They're not good people. Half the time I don't think they're real people at all, but aliens that took over people skins and are pretending to be people."

Pulling back, Jayne touched Moira's lips. "No more talking, okay?"

She smiled at him sadly. "But it's the only thing I got. My brain is the important part of me."

_"Nî hâo mêi,"_ Jayne replied. "No! I mean it!" he added when Moira snorted in disbelief. "I mean, not pretty like a Companion, but I mean... Look. You're pretty, all right? I think you're really pretty. And I like how you kiss."

_"Xièxie,"_ Moira replied, laughing. "Though I've only just learned how to. Nobody ever wanted to kiss me before."

"Well, I do. And I want you to stay."

She touched his face reverently, her smile soft and sad. He suddenly felt important, special. "No one's ever said that to me before. Nobody every wanted me around. I was too different."

"I can ignore that," he replied, feeling the curve of her hip through the silk. He was getting pretty hard, and grinned at Moira. "I can ignore a lot o' things."

She kissed him, soft and sweet. It seemed as though she was trying to be careful, as if she was afraid he might break in her arms. Jayne had never felt like that before, and it was endearing. It was actually nice to be on the receiving end of some caring without having to pay for it. He could almost pretend they were in a real relationship, that they really did care about each other, and this was really more than a desperate attempt for sex.

She let him remove the nightgown carefully, and let him kiss and suckle his way up and down her body. He was more careful this time, making sure she was wet and ready for him before entering her. Moira sighed almost contentedly, and smiled up at Jayne sweetly. "Much better this time," she said brightly. She tweaked his nose playfully and laughed when he bit her palm. "So this is what it's about?"

"Yeah."

Moira gasped as Jayne began to move. "Oh. Oh, that feels good."

He grinned at her. "Good. And it's about to get a whole lot better."

***

 

Humming, Moira wandered down to the guest deck. She had managed to fix most of the damage done to the pretty hair and makeup while in Jayne's cabin. He was sleeping soundly now, and Moira grinned. So that was what the big deal was all about. Very nice indeed. No wonder the species managed to propagate itself.

Moira slid open the door to Simon and River's room. River sat up abruptly in bed, and she smiled at Moira. "I thought you were going to be busy all night," River said, sliding off the blanket.

Moira shrugged. "I dunno. I guess everyone is trying to convince me to live."

"Was it nice?"

"Yup." She grinned at River. "I guess Tina wasn't full of shit after all. Come on, let's go talk in the other room. That way we won't wake _ge ge."_

River followed Moira to the lounge area near the kitchen, and they sat down on the couch next to each other. "Was it bad? Really?"

"Jayne's not so bad. He's sweet, really."

"No," River said, shaking her head. "The others."

Moira's jaw tightened. "You should know better, _Mei Mei."_

River flinched and looked up at the ceiling. _"Duìbùqî."_

"Has it been good here? Are they good to you?"

She smiled and played with her hands. "Yeah. I've been good. Sometimes I lose track, and I see objects that aren't really what I'm seeing. But it's almost like I can hear them, what they mean to say instead of what they actually say." River got up and began to pace around the room. "And they're scared of me sometimes, Kaylee mostly. It's not problematic, though. Simon's working on a good drug cocktail for me, so I see it less."

"So it's not good. It's not right."

River looked at Moira sharply. "No."

"Then you know what you have to do."

"No."

Moira stood. "You remember what happened."

"I was in the cryofreezer, so I don't have to do anything." River began to pace furiously, her expression a mixture of anger and frustration and panic. "I don't know anything, I didn't see anything, it's not going to happen."

"Of course it is, _Mei Mei._ Of course it is."

"I don't have a sister!" River shouted, holding her hands over her ears.

Moira grabbed River and began to shake her. "Don't you remember? It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. Don't you remember what I said? Don't you remember what I told you?"

"Let me go!" River screeched, pushing at Moira. But Moira's grip was tight and bruising, like steel. Or restraints.

_The sky was dust, the clothes were black. The faces were pale, almost gray. The faces seemed more like masks than real faces, and it was easy to pretend that the angry voices had nothing to do with what was happening. The orderlies were in perfect white, they pushed her down and tightened the leather straps. They buckled the buckles, making sure they were tight enough to keep her from moving. The halo went on, and there was the scanner above her. The black suited men with hands of blue stood behind a console, watching impassively. River tried to struggle within the straps, but there was nowhere to do. Her eyes darted everywhere, panicked, looking for some way to escape. A tray of tools tottered over, spilling instruments across the floor. One of the orderlies was swearing up a storm in three languages._

"Time to begin," one of the suited men said, his voice whisper soft. It hit River like a whipcrack.

"Yes, it is. And so we shall."

"You remember," Moira was shouting, shaking River. "You have to remember. You can't forget, you're not safe! You're not safe anywhere! You have to remember!"

_"Guan ni ziji de shi!"_ River snarled. _"Shabi!"_

But Moira wasn't letting go, and River could feel the ragged edges of nails breaking the skin. Her memory began to flash like a strobe light.

"Houzi de pigu," _one of the other girls had spat. It was soon after River had arrived at the Academy. No one had liked to be shown up, and River had just related the answer in a simpler way. River had turned away, not sure if she had been wrong to answer the professor, or if she should have kept her mouth shut._

It was in the free time they had between classes, and some of the older girls were ganging up on River. She was twelve, spindly and thin, with more brains than social sense. The brunette in front of River had been popular, and all of her friends were more than ready to bully River into submission. It was the first time she had been confronted with something like this, and River didn't know how to handle it.

"Sandy!" The voice was sharp, and carried across the recreation room.

"Go away, Moy-rah," the brunette sneered, deliberately slaughtering the pronunciation of Moira's name. "Ni Ya Lien zhangde gen Lanbi shide."__

Moira was there in an instant, lifting Sandy by the back of her neck and easily tossing her across the rec room. "I told you to stop bullying the new girls."

Sandy snarled, her hands curled into hooks. "I'm the better one, I'm the one they said was the best. You're nothing. They can't do anything else to you, you're all washed up."

"Careful, ji nu,_ someone might think you like it."_

With a roar of rage, Sandy hurled herself at Moira. Moira caught her with a punch in midleap, sending the girl backward, gasping for air. "Zao ni de xing."__

Sandy spat on the floor in front of Moira. "At least I have family to go to, whore. Yours wishes you were dead, that's why you're here."

"Tsao ni zuzong shiba dai."_ Moira paused for effect. "But then, you don't even know who your grandparents are, do you? You're nothing more than an accident your mother forgot to get rid of."_

Blanching, Sandy got to her feet. "The orderlies want to get their hands on you, bitch. They'll get you. Don't think they won't. You're worthless to them."

Moira stalked over to Sandy, who was standing confidently, arms crossed over her chest. She slapped Sandy across the face, then pushed her down. "You forget who you're talking to. You forget what I can do to you. Don't ever_ forget that."_

River watched as Sandy and her followers stalked out. She was cowering slightly as Moira approached her. "I didn't say anything," River offered tentatively.

But Moira was smiling gently at her. "You remind me of my sister."

"You have to remember!" Moira was screaming. "Or else everyone is going to die!"

_Deep in the center of the Academy's training grounds was a stadium. Simulations were run in a staggered schedule. At first there were lessons in martial arts. It trained them in meditation, discipline and conditioned their bodies. Then there was weapons training, punctuated by classroom lectures. The girls all vied for the dubious top position; not one of those ever returned for general lessons. It was believed that they were sent to an even more exclusive Academy, and only the truly extraordinary were allowed to go._

River had cried for days when Moira was taken.

"What did I tell you? I tried to tell you! Repeat it! Repeat it after me."

_"There's something I need to tell you," Moira whispered in the Inner Courtyard. No one was allowed into the Outer Courtyard. That was for professors, dignitaries and the prospective students. Actual enrolled students got no farther than the Inner Courtyard, and that was quite the privilege in and of itself._

"What?" River asked, surprised. She had only been there for five months, and Moira was easily her best friend. The other girls were more standoffish. Sandy had been sent away after the fight with Moira, and the other girls were lost without their leader.

"I'm going to give you a poem. It's very important. You have to remember it. Because I don't think I'll be here much longer, and you have to be careful. If they come for you..."

"I don't understand. What's going on here?"

"It's worse than we thought, Mei Mei._ Much worse. Repeat after me."_

"In the dark they come for you, two by two, hands of blue. In the dark they come to feed, insides bleed, poison seed. Into your head they will go, all you know, they will know. Everything will turn to red, in your head, then you're dead."

There were other voices shouting now, and River was disoriented. Kaylee and Simon were pulling her away from Moira, and Zoe and Mal were dragging Moira away. Moira's eyes locked to River's. "You have to remember!"

River was shaking, and she couldn't feel her feet or hands. Her lips were getting tingly, too, and she forced her breathing to slow. She turned to Simon, expression intent. "It's hypocalcemia. No more free ionic calcium. I need to breathe."

"Come on, River," Simon said gently, easing her onto a couch. "Sit down. We're going to figure this out, okay?"

River looked from Simon to Kaylee, and smiled at them, relieved. "Oh good. You're talking again. You've worked it out and you can be a family now." She grinned excitedly at Kaylee. "Will I be an auntie soon? Please? I promise I'll be good."

Kaylee flushed and cleared her throat. "Er, we'll talk about that later, okay? I don't know if now's the time for that." Simon looked at Kaylee, his face a question. She refused to look at him, and smiled brightly for River's sake. "So what happened here?"

"She needs to remember," Moira called out. She had stopped struggling against Mal and Zoe, and was looking rather defeated. "But I don't know if she can."

"How about we have our little talk now?" Mal growled. "I don't much appreciate being woken up by screaming girls fighting in my rec room."

"But she wasn't fighting me!" River cried, jumping up. She pushed past Kaylee. "She was fighting Sandy, she was making them all leave me alone after class!"

Moira sagged against Mal in relief and laughed crazily. "I did! I did!"

"She was trying to tell me about them. About the needles and the hands of blue, the red and the brains and the fighting and the testing...." River put her hands up in front of her mouth, the color draining out of her face. "Oh." River's voice had dropped to just above a whisper. "Oh. I remember. I remember."

Moira turned around and looked up into Mal's face. She looked almost triumphant. "Captain, she remembers now. She remembers everything."

"So now the both of you can tell me about this place?"

"The sounds are moving," River said suddenly. "We can't."

Moira turned around, her face a question. _"Mei mei?"_

"They're not done. It only just started, they haven't finished all of the testing yet, they only just started the new protocol." River turned to look at Simon, her eyes wide with fear. "Simon, they aren't done with me yet."

"Do you think they can track where you are?" Simon asked hesitantly. "Do you think they're following us?"

"We don't know enough. Not enough data, can't formulate a proper hypothesis. This is challenging. We can't know the next step until we have enough data about the new protocol they've just started."

"It's just the next upgrade," Moira said, matter-of-factly. "You can extrapolate off of my data."

River shook her head. "There are too many variables. We can't just _assume_ we know which way they're going to go with the next set of upgrades. We don't know what their ultimate goal is. You can't guess what the final product will be."

"Sure I can." Moira shrugged. "Didn't they talk around you? The orderlies always talked too much before their insides melted. You can hear them whispering amongst themselves before their insides melted and turned red."

River cocked her head to the side. "They didn't talk around me."

"You were too new, then. I was in that hallway for almost two years." Moira looked at Simon a bit uncertainly. "I think?"

"Why don't we all sit down and talk it over?" Simon suggested.

"It's really late. We'll be sleepy." Moira sat down in the same chair she had sat down in hours before. "Should we wake up Jayne? He was sleeping so peacefully when I left, I'd hate to wake him up. People are usually really cranky if you wake them up."

Mal raised an eyebrow at Moira, and Zoe smothered a laugh at Mal's expression.

"I don't think we need him here," Zoe said. "Why don't we start?"

Everyone moved to sit down around the table. Moira shrugged, then looked at River. _"Wo nén qin ni tiào wu ma...?"_

River nodded. "Please. I don't know where to begin."

Moira sighed. "I do."

***  
***


	4. Chapter 4

Moira leaned back in the chair and threaded her fingers together. She stretched her arms out in front of her and twisted her fingers and wrists. "There's a war coming on. There's divisiveness in the ranks. They're trying to prepare for the worst."

"What war? What _goram_ war are you talking about?" Mal asked, annoyed.

"In the Academy, they don't like using names. They look at you but you're nothing more than a number, an experiment in a series. And they give you a number. And they don't have names for each other, not real names." Moira leaned her head back and her hands were still extended outward, away from her. "And they pull you aside. There's a special program, only the best and brightest get to go. It's only for a limited amount of students. Here's a code, present it at the next advisor's meeting and they'll tell you what to do. And then you go, and then they go and lie, and then it all begins."

Moira fell to silence, her fingers twisting listlessly. Her breathing was harsh and ragged. "I had this feeling. You know to trust them if you're always somewhere new. And there was just something that set me off, something that didn't seem quite right. But it crumbles, the resolve falls all away, away. You can explain it away, people that don't know how to speak, someone going too soon with the explaining. You want to believe it, you want to think they're really doing what they said they're going to do and you're where you need to be. But then you think you need to peel your heart away to give them something to pay for it all, because the looks that they give you make you know you're not good enough. And then you know it, and you can feel it crawling beneath the skin, an itch in the brain, something creeping there and making you feel sick. But you don't want to believe it, you don't want to think they'll be hurting you. And maybe the chair treatment is just to get the itching out, the whole thing is to make it stop, to coat the excitatory lesions with a velvet coat, soft and smooth. Maybe then you'll stop with the seizures, maybe then it'll be like a holiday."

"Moira," River whispered. "They said you were going into the accelerated program."

"Beginning version. Lances across the brain, rupturing vessels with a sclerotic agent. Neuro knives, eliminating choice bits of brain with a series of ministrokes."

"Nothing mini about those things," Kaylee muttered.

"The part that hurts the most is that you let them do it, you think they'll help you if they do it, they'll love you if you let them. So you let them cut your brain apart, you let them lock you into tiny cubicles with simulators. So you fight their demons and win. You fight each other and bite down into blood. You watch them take out their wands that make people bleed and die. You watch it happen and you don't say a word because you think it'll all get better. Someone somewhere will come for you, someone will care. But they don't. There's no one out there, nobody cares, nobody's coming, and you won't ever get anywhere.

"Of course, that's when the orderlies start to talk. When they pull the other girls apart, you hear them gloat through the walls. You hear them tell you that you're next, that the tests won't make your fighting reflexes faster, that you haven't scored well enough in espionage. You hear them tell you that you have to swallow it down and get caught up or then they get their hands on you, and it doesn't matter if it's yours or if it's mine, you're screaming and it's all crossed the line, it's over now. It's gone, everything is over and it's time to turn away and pretend you haven't seen it happen. You watch the girls get tied down and gagged, you watch the orderlies take their turns with the girls that don't pass the tests and are too broken to be sent back down. You hear them joke, they joke all the time on their smoke breaks. The whispers carry down the corridor, and your hearing is well enough to pick it up, every syllable. You know you're next if you can't keep up, if you're not good enough, if the hands of blue whisper amongst themselves that this isn't good enough."

Moira continued to stare at the ceiling, eyes unfocused. Her hands had slowly stopped twisting, and they soon rested in her lap, some of the nightgown's silk caught in her fists. She continued, tears slowly slipping down her cheeks and disappearing into her hair.

"And I'm the first one with the perfected neuro knife, the first one strapped down beneath the blades, brain flayed alive. And you feel it, they don't damp it down. They whisper about their hidden wars as the bone saws bite down, the grinning skulls gleaming in the lamplight, black suit pressed neat and flawless. You can hear their whispers, something happened bad, something got cut by accident, the wrong vessel was sclerosed. Let's find out what happens, they say, we have more girls to spare."

Kaylee shivered, and Simon covered one of her hands with his. She looked up, startled, then gave him a fragile smile. She turned her hand slightly in his grasp, fingers curling around his. He gave her a small squeeze and returned her smile.

"What about the war?" Mal asked, insistent.

"They brought it back, the old starcharts and maps. Have us look, take a look, where would you want to be? Where would there be life? How can we tell about intelligence. Our welcome's worn out where we are, we've terraformed to death, the earth will reject us and make us crawl on into the infinite. And then you close your eyes and slip down into darkness, take it all in, predict on limited data, process the infinite."

"They did that to me," River whispered. "The terraforming crews would need input in the simulation, but the worlds didn't map the known star charts, they seemed too far away from the Core Worlds. I thought the simulation was too farfetched and told them so."

Moira didn't seem to hear her. "But the war is coming, they need their soldiers, the ones able to slip beneath the shadows and take the soul from your lips, dust from your shoes and wind from your lungs. The demo was no demo, they have the FTL drives, they have the technology to go beyond our known realm and discover the rest of infinity."

Zoe, Wash and Mal all exchanged significant looks at the words "FTL drives." Every publicized FTL test run had resulted in horrific accidents and one missing ship. It had been assumed afterward that FTL wasn't possible.

But had the Academy's collection of pet geniuses solved the problem?

"But they die," River was saying. "You can't go past the barrier of light speed. You can only approach it, you can never meet it. Your body will stretch into the infinite, you will get caught and never age while everything around you lives and dies."

"Yes, they die," Moira said dreamily. She brought her right hand to her face, fingers curled in so that the nails were just against her skin. "They feel it. Light as anything at first, like a dream. They strap themselves in to test the new drives, they'll go faster than anything on the market. But they're not told it's FTL. They don't say a word. They strap in, they flip the switches, off they go and let the sensors record. And the test pilots die, they can't make the jump across the barrier, their hearts and head don't take the strain." Her fingernails began pressing harder against her skin, indenting it. "They blow up, a burst of blood and brain against the screens, nothing left to bury once they cross back into our space."

"No. It doesn't work that way," River said, brows furrowed. "It can't."

"It did. And I pointed out some errors, but I couldn't wrap my brain around the rest of them, I couldn't make it match, it didn't balance and I couldn't tell where in the lines of code it was. I couldn't fix it fully. I couldn't stop it." Her nails began to dig into the skin of her cheek, a deeper indentation of skin. "And they were angry, and threatened to make the sounds come, threatened to let the orderlies have my remains to play with. And I tried, I tried and tried, but I couldn't make them stop dying. They couldn't accept the jump, they were dead. There was no way to stop it in the equations, no other way to make the leap."

"But someone did, you said the drive was used," Mal interrupted. He didn't notice Moira digging into her face since he was staring at Zoe and Wash.

Simon was horrified enough for him anyway. River pushed his hand away when Simon reached out to Moira.

"They said to accept any variable, regardless of what it meant. If X was needed to make the jump, just accept it and move on. Just do it, let it go, lose the errors and make it work. Others would puzzle out the finer points, but they needed the gross equations." Moira pushed deeper into her cheek. "So then you take it inside, and in your head you feel it coming, you know what you have to do, and you let them die and you bring them back and hope they're not funny in the head and that the hypoxia doesn't do anything long term and they can pilot their way back home. Or you hope a cryosleep chamber can alleviate the damage, you tell yourself it's only another sim, it's only something for paper." Moira made a choking sound as blood welled up beneath her fingernails. "But it's not."

Mal finally seemed to notice. "Hey! You stop that!"

"They crumple down to the ground like paper. Their faces get pasty white, they feel it. Death comes, fluttering against their skin, then ripping in, digging deep for their hearts. Tasty red muscle, pumping before stopping, dragging them across the galaxy. Another universe away, the tubes begin to pump again, they stop the brain death, perfuse the tissues. Then the gasp, breath resumes, skin peels. They move, staggering, coordination lost at first, deep tendon reflexes null, eyes not able to accommodate. Then it kicks back in, reanimating the dead, they grimace and smile their bloody smiles and then it's off to catalogue the land of the dead."

Mal yanked Moira's hand away from her face, wincing at the deep furrows cutting across her cheek. "Stop it, Moira."

"They crawl inside, they nest. They hit the heart and hide in the holes of your soul and you think you come back whole but you break apart and shatter when they're done with you, they cut you open just to live, you bring the hunt back to life."

"What are you talking about?"

"Intelligent. Highly intelligent but not like ours, formal and symbolic, not like ours. It's a different kind of thing. They can't talk to us, we can't talk to them. They're different, changed somehow, it doesn't work the same way. They drink the souls of the dead and then only speak in tongues, so we have to be changed to speak the same language."

"They took away your ability to regulate emotion," Simon said. "The amygdala...."

"And the hippocampus, and the cingulate gyrus, and the interconnections. The ones for memory were added to, enhanced. Long term memory tracks laid down, multiple one way tracks, the circuit completing thousands of times faster. The tracks to inhibit were destroyed in the process, lost to scar tissue. The emotional lability is a side effect, something lost in translation. More fear, but no more reaction to fear. Fight, not flight. Anger, not love. Not passive. Not at all the same as the hypersexual creatures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Nothing so flawed and crude as that. Pinpoint fine, perfected. They augmented the stress reactions, tightened the reflex arcs, made us move faster and better. And the arc work wicked fast, nothing lost along the way. But there are too many side effects. Labile, visual, some orbitofrontal release, almost as if it were a frontal lobe dementia."

Moira's eyes were glassy as she recited this to Simon. "You think you know, but you don't know. You lost it along the way. You lost the ability to dream, you can't think but in concrete, you lost the abstract and visuospatial loops to be creative. You lost the familiarity with the soul. You know the lists and meds, you know the signs and symptoms. But you lost the thread, you lost the binding between us all. You lost it and you never realized it because you never realized you had it, so there was nothing to miss."

"What about the drives?" Mal insisted. "These FTL drives.... This war... What _goram_ war are they fighting?"

"Themselves. The others. The ones that came back, the ones that followed the ion trails back and found the way to break the barriers back and intrude on the edges of our space. Alliance found them, Alliance shattered. And so the Elites were sent, and the Hands, and their eyes closed as they thought, and there was no one else who knew to send."

"How close is it to being dangerous?" Zoe asked.

"It is already. It's complicated. It's frustrated, so little hope, so little time. We're stumbling in the dark, seeing the sparks, the light dying, complicating things. There's no light in the tunnel, nothing in the dark but your breath, falling out and away and getting lost in the dark." Moira turned her diffuse gaze from Zoe to Mal. "The mask has fallen. The mirrors twist the light but it's not going down the tunnels far enough. They're falling. They need their warriors, and the old guard wasn't good enough on sims. They needed to recut the mold, they needed to try the next best thing, the new thing, Version Two Point Oh."

"River."

River turned her frightened eyes from Moira to Mal. "No. I know nothing of this."

"You don't have to. You are." Moira let her eyes slide from Mal's face as her head fell backward.

River jumped to her feet. "You can't be right."

"We weren't ever meant to know. But tales were told, the orderlies talk, they bully and threaten their way with the girls the Hands don't want, the ones too broken by tests to be useful, the ones that don't take well to the procedures, the ones that fight too hard and can't be broken. They will take their property back when they are done, they'll make the orderlies bleed if they have to, they count the days until it's done. And in Fibonacci Sequence they collect us, back and forth, front and back, line up straight, time to go."

"They didn't say that. They never said that," River said sharply, voice rising. She sounded on the edge of panic. "They don't speak, not if they don't have to. They watch when we're strapped down. They watch and talk over the screams, they whisper in the rooms and never at us, they never talk to us if they can help it!"

Moira let her head fall back, her jaw clicking with a snap. "Well, you didn't have a good day there, now did you?"

_"Ji nu!"_ River screeched, leaping across the kitchen table. Simon and Kaylee caught her about the waist and pulled her back, each person grabbing an arm to keep her steady.

Eyes blank and placid, Moira let her head fall further down. "They will come. They will find you, Version Two, they will want their warrior back, their tactician, their simulation. They will want the ends of the universe explored and expanded, they will want the interlopers extruded."

_"LIAR!"_ River screeched, pulling against Simon and Kaylee. "You're lying! They're not coming! I'm no warrior, I don't know that!"

Kaylee thought of River giggling, gun in hand, dead bodies behind her. "Nothing in the 'verse can stop me," River had parroted. Kaylee turned to Simon, eyes wide with remembered fear. Simon pulled River tight against his chest, his hands brushing past Kaylee's arms. She almost felt comforted, almost secure.

"Ah, _Mei mei,_ there's no comfort in lying to yourself. There's no truth in lies."

"They won't get me," River said, voice trembling with her rising panic. "Simon will keep them away. The captain will keep me safe. They promised."

Moira let her head fall back forward, smiling at River vacantly. "They will try. They might fail, they might not. I wanted to give you a fighting chance. The Hands of Blue shouldn't get you. _Chufei wo sile."_

River began to cry silently, and she turned in the circle of Simon's arms. He held her close with one arm, and held onto Kaylee's hand tightly with the other. She looked up at him, startled, her entire expression a question. _Don't go,_ Simon mouthed silently. _Please._

Kaylee bit her lip, then nodded. She wasn't uncertain about him, not at all. He was her shiny doctor boy, her _shuai_ boy that didn't know how to talk to girls. It was just... sometimes, she felt silly and stupid and horribly common, that there was nothing she could offer him. It was in glances that he spoke the most eloquently, the sidelong longing glances he never knew she could see, the wistful expression as she passed from his sight.

"We're in big trouble, aren't we?" Wash murmured, looking over the scene.

Moira nodded at him earnestly. _"Duìbùqi, wo búshì gùyì de._ But you needed to know, I couldn't think of any other way to save _Mei Mei."_

Mal watched as Moira stood up from the table. "And just where do you think you're going now?"

"They're coming. They're always coming. Can't you feel it? Crawling on your skin, a touch from their spirits chilling you? Can't you feel it?"

Her voice was eerily calm as she climbed up on top of the chair and pressed her hands against the ceiling. "Can't you feel it? It starts with one.... just one... expands... the ends of the universe closing in around you and the ends of the worlds are beginning and it's amping up, ramping up, time to begin again, time to start, time to go."

"I think you should get down from there," Mal said, extending an arm toward Moira. "Come on now, get down and we'll talk like reasonable people."

She looked down at Mal, her lips curling into a soft smile. "Oh, but they're not reasonable. Not reasonable at all." Moira took her hands away from the ceiling. "My brain is fuzzy. It feels all wrapped up and wrong somehow. I think they put the wrong brain back in after surgery, it doesn't feel like mine anymore at all." She jumped down from the chair, the nightgown fluttering around her. "I think I left my mind belowstairs."

Mal watched as Moira left the kitchen area, distracted, eyes unfocused and distant. "There's something not quite right about that girl. It's like watching someone fall apart in front of you."

"That's because she did," Zoe replied blandly. She uncrossed her arms and began to follow Moira. "I'll see what she's up to."

"Let me go with you," Wash offered, looking at Zoe in concern. She nodded at him absently, and they went off after Moira.

Mal looked at the tableau left in front of him. "You three okay?"

River shook her head against Simon's chest as Simon and Kaylee looked at Mal helplessly. "She's not my sister," River mumbled against Simon's chest.

"Maybe not, but do you think she really is trying to help you like one?"

River nodded and turned toward Mal slightly. Her eyes were shining wet with tears. "Is she going to be mad at me? For saying she's not my sister?"

"I think she knows you're upset," Simon murmured, stroking her hair gently. "Come on, why don't we go talk to her?"

River nodded and pulled away from Simon. She tried to smile at him, and wiped at her face with the back of her hands. "She was my friend, my only real friend there. The other girls were jealous, they hated me. They didn't want me there. She made them go away, she helped make it better for me at the Academy. She called me _Mei Mei._ We were friends there. And I did nothing but yell at her."

"Let's go. You can apologize for that."

They descended to the cargo bay. River heard the voices first, Jayne sounding sleepy and confused and Moira sounding erratic. Zoe's calm voice rose above it all, and River could almost make out the words. "...calm. Everything's under control here."

"No," River murmured. "It's not."

"What is it?" Kaylee asked gently. "Do you hear something?"

"It's not under control," River said, not looking at Kaylee. "She's wrong, it's not under control, things aren't stable. It's labile still, everything's about to explode."

They hurried down into the cargo bay, where Zoe and Wash were standing in a triangle formation, Jayne and Moira making up the other two points. Moira had her hands tangled up in her hair, pulling on it. Tears were streaming down her face, and she was gasping for breath, making little choking sounds. Jayne was still in his bedclothes and holding a gun, apparently having just been woken by the hysterical girl.

"I sit on the sky on a dark night, the moon above becoming a sun. I can hear the heart beating in time, move through this, end all this. I know it's happening. Tension rising steadily, it's all forcing its way out of me, trying to find an exit." Moira looked up at Jayne desperately, ignoring River calling her name. "Can you help me wash it all away?"

"What're you talking about? What'd I miss?" he asked, rubbing at his eyes. "I heard yellin' and came out here. Is something happening?"

She moved forward on the tips of her toes, twirling gently. Moira could see River, Simon and Kaylee step down from the stairs, now forming a square on the cargo bay floor. Moira smiled at Jayne gently, leaning in to kiss his lips gently. She reminded him of a butterfly, soft and ethereal, something flitting just out of his reach.

And then she wrenched the gun from his grasp and somersaulted backward while he was still in shock, her foot connecting squarely with his jaw.

Jayne tumbled backward, surprised, and Moira held the gun aimed squarely at River's chest. "I can keep it all at bay. I can make it stop." She smiled serenely, looking as though she had just invited the crew to a party. "I can help you, _Mei Mei,_ if only you'd let me."

"Moira," River sobbed, bringing her hands up to her mouth. "Don't."

"I regret very little. I can't remember much. You became a part of me. I can't remember my blood _Mei Mei_, I can't remember my parents' names. I remember the pain of it. I remember the feel of the rejection, the sting of a palm against my face. I remember feeling as though my heart was going to explode from the horror or it all, the pain of them slicing through me. I remember this, I never had a _Ge Ge_ to protect me from it. I can't become lost in it, but I know I'm about to lose my grip, I was fighting it. I'm running out of good days, and I don't want the same to happen to you."

River flinched under Moira's intense gaze. "Don't, don't do this."

Mal and Zoe both had guns trained on Moira. "Drop it, Moira. Don't make me do something we'll all regret."

"Oh?" Moira looked up, her mouth curved into a smile that looked almost sensual. "And how is it something I'll regret. I want her to remember. I want her to know. I want it all to end."

Mal suddenly remembered his promise to her the day before, and was sincerely regretting it. "Just put it down. We can discuss this."

"The time for discussion is over," Moira said, voice firm. She pulled back the safety of the gun, and it was still leveled at River's heart. "This is my time of the year. This is my good day, this is what I've chosen to do." She grinned suddenly, heartbreakingly. "Keep your promise to me, keep it, do what you need to do, I need you to do it."

"Don't move!" Zoe yelled.

Moira stepped forward. Grinning madly, she looked almost ready to shoot.

Mal fired, catching Moira in the shoulder. Zoe fired with her sawed off shotgun simultaneously, catching Moira mid-spin. The force of the second blast sent her careening backward, tripping over the scattered cargo boxes. Moira fell backward, a soft smile on her face, and the base of her skull connected sharply with a metal cargo crate.

River cried out in fear, and Simon pulled her back. "River, don't."

"She's...." Kaylee turned from Moira to Simon. "Is she?"

Simon stepped forward, seeing Moira move sluggishly. "Moira?"

"Good... day... today..." she murmured, eyes losing focus. "Keep _Mei Mei_ safe...." She had lost her grip on Jayne's gun as she fell, and Simon could see blood pooling beneath her head. Her hands fluttered down to the floor next to her, useless.

"Moira?" Simon asked, kneeling down next to her. He pried open an eye and gasped at the sight of her blown-out pupils. He turned to look at River and Kaylee, then up at Mal. "I don't think I can stop this. It's going too fast."

River struggled against Kaylee's arms. "Take her brain! We need to eat her brain! We can't let them get it, they can't know she was here, can't take it out of her head! They'll know! We have to eat her brain!"

"I'll take care of her," Simon said gently, closing Moira's eyes. "I'll take care of her brain."

"Simon," River pleaded, tears streaming. "We have to protect her."

"I'll take care of her," Simon repeated, standing as Moira stopped breathing. "I'll do everything I need to do."

River turned against Kaylee and began sobbing. Kaylee wrapped her arms around River's thin frame and began to make soothing nonsense noises.

"We'll take care of this," Mal said, coming down the stairs next to River and Kaylee. "We promised her. We keep our promises, all of them."

River watched over Kaylee's shoulder as Mal and Zoe holstered their guns and then moved to where Simon was standing over Moira. "Thank you," she murmured.

Jayne pushed himself up to a standing position and moved over to Simon. "What did she do that for? Didn't she think we could help her?"

Simon looked at Jayne, feeling emptier than he had in a long time. He never liked death, especially not violent death. He was a doctor, he was supposed to heal the sick and be their advocate. He wasn't supposed to aid in a patient's suicide. "She did think we could help her. She just wanted our help in dying."

Jayne's jaws clicked shut, and he nodded. He looked down at Moira for a moment, blood everywhere. _I think I could like you,_ she had whispered as he had fallen asleep. _I almost could get used to this._

Almost was never good enough.

He moved past everyone in silence, then locked himself into his bunk. The others slowly dispersed, until Simon, River and Mal were the last ones in the cargo bay. "I'll see you later," Kaylee had murmured to Simon. "Talk to me."

"I will," Simon promised, giving her hand a squeeze.

Now he watched River trace the edge of Moira's jaw. "The vessels must have been too fragile, the sinuses must have broken in the fall," River said, voice matter of fact. "The treatments left her vulnerable to injury by falls."

"We'll take care of her," Mal promised. River looked up, eyes shining wet. "We promise."

"We'll be her _Ge Ge_ now," Simon added, helping River to her feet. "We'll do our duty. We'll keep her brain from getting to the Hands of Blue."

River nodded, then kissed Simon's cheek gently. Then she quickly turned and gave Mal a kiss on the cheek as well, startling him. _"Xiexie,"_ she whispered, then ran from the room.

Mal and Simon exchanged glances. "She thought it was a good day," Simon said quietly. "Do you think it was?"

"She did what she needed to do," Mal said gruffly. "Now we know what we're up against. Now we'll be prepared. Your sister will be safe."

Simon nodded, and then both men lifted Moira to bring her to the Infirmary. There was work to be done; they had promised.

Life didn't stop, it merely moved on and took you along with it for the ride.

End


End file.
